The interstellar age
Subtitle: inside the forty-year Voyager mission
By: Jim Bell
Publisher: Dutton
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9780525954323
Subjects: Voyager Project; Exploration; Planets
Description: "The story of the men and women who drove the Voyager spacecraft mission--told by a scientist who was there from the beginning. The Voyager spacecraft are our farthest-flung emissaries-11.3 billion miles away from the crew who built and still operate them, decades since their launch. Voyager 1 left the solar system in 2012; its sister craft, Voyager 2, will do so in 2015. The fantastic journey began in 1977, before the first episode of Cosmos aired. The mission was planned as a grand tour beyond the moon; beyond Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; and maybe even into interstellar space. The fact that it actually happened makes this humanity's greatest space mission. In The Interstellar Age, award-winning planetary scientist Jim Bell reveals what drove and continues to drive the members of this extraordinary team, including Ed Stone, Voyager's chief scientist and the one-time head of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab; Charley Kohlhase, an orbital dynamics engineer who helped to design many of the critical slingshot maneuvers around planets that enabled the Voyagers to travel so far; and the geologist whose Earth-bound experience would prove of little help in interpreting the strange new landscapes revealed in the Voyagers' astoundingly clear images of moons and planets. Speeding through space at a mind-bending eleven miles a second, Voyager 1 is now beyond our solar system's planets. It carries with it artifacts of human civilization. By the time Voyager passes its first star in about 40,000 years, the gold record on the spacecraft, containing various music and images including Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," will still be playable"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 297-308) and index.
Table of contents: title: Outbound; title: Alignment. Voyagers ; Gravity assist ; Message in a bottle; title: The Grand Tour. New worlds among the king's court ; Drama within the rings ; Bull's-eye at a tilted world ; Last of the ice giants; title: Looking back, looking ahead. Five billion people per pixel ; The edge of interstellar space ; Other stars, other planets, other life; title: NewSpace.